Talkmobile has improved its £7.50 monthly contract with the Sony Xperia U smartphone. The contract now includes 250 minutes, 5000 texts and 500MB data without any initial fee.This means that the total cost of ownership for the contract is only £180. In comparison, the PAYG price of the handset is £159.90.

The deal is available from E2Save, a subsidiary of Carphone Warehouse, which means that the handset is likely to be unlocked.

The phone - which was reviewed by our own Sandra Vogel - has a dual core Cortex-A9 based processor from STEricsson clocked at 1GHz with 512MB of RAM, a 3.5in display with a 854 x 480 pixels resolution, 8GB on-board storage (without any microSD card slot), a 5-megapixel camera with flash and HD recording plus a front facing one.The handset runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread and there should be an upgrade to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich soon.

It's worth noting that the phone shares a few characteristics with the Apple iPhone 4 but ends up costing around third of the price and significantly less on a contract.Source : E2Save